Castillo de San Marcos - Built at Sea Level in 1672.

Castillo de San Marcos - Still at Sea Level in 2025.

How is this of any significance to humanity? Seems like a weird way to waste both time and money.

Now all my crappy code will crash much faster. ;)

I made my chat font Comic Sans because I think it's funny that the "Supreme Allied Linux Commander" for our organization (me) uses Comic Sans on Skype For Business. Keeps 'em on their toes.

But Brave Browser has no problem blocking them.

The point of advertising is to generate demand (want). The more you can influence people to want your product, the more of your product you're going to sell.

Does it make a difference whether you pay a slightly higher monthly fee and are able to cancel without hassle, or have to fight tooth and nail to cancel and get dinged for additional months of service you didn't want or need?

I bought $1000USD of Doge back when it took 12 of them to make a single penny just to have fun with on IRC. We set up a doge wallet bot and used tipping in Doge as a way to encourage productive/constructive comments and contributions to our little channel, as well as educating people about crypto. I ended up giving away at least half of the Doges to various channel dwellers just for the fun of it. (Using random soaks & tips of 100 doge here & there.)

Fast forward to now it's around .13c per doge and the coin I so liberally threw around like confetti actually has some value. It feels really good to have contributed in a positive way to crypto-currency awareness and to see those contributions actually have value.

I still have quite a bit of Doge left and it has oddly turned out to be one of the most entertaining & enjoyable successful investments I've made.

TO THE MOON!

It used to only be a few lines, starting with:

"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;"

From GP:

Switzerland though, the only country in Europe where they are legal to own

Is wrong, because the Czech Republic has relatively lax gun laws, and is part of Europe.

It's hard to get a permit to carry a gun for protection, generally very hard.

And that is the difference. Gun ownership is quite possible in most of Europe and Canada. However, you guys cannot carry them around and shoot criminals you threaten you like I can in the USA (it is not that simple: I would face intense scrutiny by police and prosecutors if I fired in self defense, to ensure that my self-defense claim is valid).

Our Second Amendment is not just about firearm ownership, it is about bearing arms, that is, actually carrying them as we go about our daily business. Whether one agrees that it is a good idea to enshrine in the U.S. Constitution or not is a different matter: our Supreme Court has backed up our right to own and carry handguns for self defense. source.

If you want to shoot firearms for sport in most of the Western World, that is relatively easy. Even in "gun-free" nations you can likely either own a firearm under restriction, or go to a firing range and use one of theirs for target practice without much hassle as long as you aren't a criminal. That covers 99% of the cases where a firearm is discharged by a civilian in the West. Despite being American and supporting the right to self-defense, I have been to gun ranges enough times and read the news often enough to know that while firearms are used in self-defense, most of the time we shoot them for sport.

The saying "one bad apple..." is a bit of an overstatement

Finish the quote:

One bad apple spoils the bunch

Suppose we have a "good cop" who refuses to cross the blue line and stop a fellow officer from abusing a suspect in custody, for example, beating a person in handcuffs laying on the floor who offers no resistance. Clearly the officer abusing authority by beating a prone suspect is a bad cop. However, the good cop is now bad too, for failing to stand up for basic human rights. The bad apple spoiled at least one other.

That is the problem we, in the USA (and elsewhere but I live in the USA) have: our government and its agents have little to no accountability when they do wrong. Yes, some bad cops get convicted of felonies and go to jail. Others get fired and have their names dragged through the mud. Meanwhile, alleged "good cops" watch the bad cops do bad things, complicit in their crimes.

It's illegal to take money for flights in private planes.

I think you are confusing license/certification types with aircraft types. Taking money or other payment for providing the service of flying requires a commercial pilot or airline transport pilot license. There are multiple types of licenses from sport pilot, recreational pilot, private pilot, to airline transport pilot and a couple obscure ones in-between.

It is possible to accept payment for transporting a passenger in a Cessna single-prop aircraft. However, the licensing and certification requirements (commercial pilot) would be excessive for the type of person who would own and fly such an airplane. That is why it is rarely ever done in practice.

source source.

We were shooting in Tunisia, and the script had a scene in which I fight a swordsman, an expert swordsman, it was meant to be the ultimate duel between sword and whip. And I was suffering from dysentery, really, found it inconvenient to be out of my trailer for more than 10 minutes at a time. We'd done a brief rehearsal of the scene the night before we were meant to shoot it, and both Steve and I realized it would take 2 or 3 days to shoot this. And it was the last thing we were meant to shoot in Tunisia before we left to shoot in England. And the scene before this in the film included a whip fight against 5 bad guys that were trying to kidnap Marian, so I thought it was a bit redundant. I was puzzling how to get out of this 3 days of shooting, so when I got to set I proposed to Steven that we just shoot the son a bitch and Steve said "I was thinking that as well." So he drew his sword, the poor guy was a wonderful British stuntman who had practiced his sword skills for months in order to do this job, and was quite surprised by the idea that we would dispatch him in 5 minutes. But he flourished his sword, I pulled out my gun and shot him, and then we went back to England.

Source

DMCA most certainly does prohibit writing code of certain functionality.

DMCA prohibits circumventing copy protection, which is an end-around the fair use law. Since a browser plugin runs in the browser, the endpoint that must decrypt and display any encrypted content such as ads, how is the DMCA relevant even if web sites start delivering encrypted content?

(BTW, fellow Americans, I just wanna remind you that this is another election year. Last one, almost nobody took seriously. If you also don't take this election seriously too, then that's another 2 years with no chance of repealing DMCA, instead of a terribly slim chance.)

Please tell me which candidates that have an actual chance at being elected to office want to repeal the DMCA? Which Presidential candidate who actually won at least one electoral vote last election would have signed such a repeal bill had Congress passed it? Considering that the past few decades have given us nothing but a more restrictive IP regime and no serious debate on the topic occurring where it actually matters (Congress), I believe there is approximately a 0% chance of any meaningful copyright reform for the foreseeable future.

Congress is the board of directors, and they need to be taken out of the day to day decision system.

This is by design. The Constitution even limits the military budget process to no more than two years, with no similar limit on any other cabinet department. Back in 1789 when the Constitution was drafted, military coups were more common than they are today. Even outside of coups, military leaders were far more influential in governments. Our founders wanted to prevent that and put the military firmly under the control of civilians, to mitigate the risk of a powerful military controlling or even taking over the government.

After WW2, with the Cold War in full swing, the military became a favorite vehicle for delivering pork, as well. That, to me, is the real problem here. Our military is no longer about defense (sorry, "invading Iraq" which is 7,000 miles away is not "defending our country"). It is designed to evoke patriotism and support in the people so the wealthy can funnel lucrative contracts to favored military-industrial complex contractors. Essentially, stealing from the poor (taxpayers) to give to the rich (CEOs of companies like Boeing). Yes, those companies provide some value. However, they do so with gross inefficiency and well beyond the level required to defend U.S. soil. That is the problem that needs solving.